What Is A Hostmask?

When you connect to GeekShed, the server reads information from your client and sets a hostmask that is used to identify you on the network. Perhaps obviously, your hostmask hides (or masks) some of the specifics about your connection (in other words, your host). Your hostmask will take this general format:

You may have noticed that some people have vhosts, a virtual hostname, which hide their real connection’s name. On the GeekShed network, you can be assigned a vhost if you donate to the site or if you have been registered for 90 days or longer. If LordBaconCheeseburger donated $5 to the network, for example, his hostmask could change to LordBaconCheeseburger!~TFlash@nickel.supporter.geekshed.net. If someone has a vhost, you can still see the person’s actual hostmask with the command, /userip <nick>.

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Have you ever had your computer, Internet or modem go down while you were on GeekShed, and then when you log back in you find out that your nickname is still connected? If so, you have been a ghost on the GeekShed network. On IRC, a ghost session is one which is not actually connected,…

One of the more frustrating errors you can get on GeekShed asks you to use a “more obscure” password. In most cases, when people comes to #help to ask about this error, they have tried a strange and random password, but still get this error: Please try again with a more obscure password. Passwords should…

Last week, I explained how to set a simple channel ban that takes care of most situations. Occasionally, you need a stronger or different kind of ban. This week I’ll explain the more complicated channel bans that you can use. Check the Extended Ban tutorial for additional options. First, you need to understand the different…

One of the first things that you do when you join us on GeekShed is choose and register a nickname. The basic guidelines are pretty simple. Just choose something that is unique, that is easy to type and remember, and that doesn’t give away private information. Beyond that, there are some restrictions on nicknames. Your…

If you were on Facebook and wanted to know more about someone, you’d go to their profile and click the Info or About link (depending upon whether the person has set up the Timeline). We don’t have profile pages in IRC, but you can use some basic commands to learn a little bit more about…

When you use the /whois command or /ns info on yourself, you may notice the tilde before your connection information. Here’s an example: ~ilovestig@somewhere.com That leading tilde (~) indicates that you are not running identd on your machine. As Phil explains it, identd is an age-old service that runs on port 113 and was designed…

The AJOIN command is a server-side command that keeps track of the channels you join each time you connect to GeekShed. If you login with your nick and identify with your password, you can join all the same channels automatically. It works no matter what client you use or where you connect from since all…

When I join #theshed the channel bot, Sheldon, posts this greeting: [11:20] Sheldon: [Bunny] Go Hokies! That’s a channel greeting, an individualized greeting that is announced to the entire channel. It’s different from the Channel Entry Message, the private message sent to everyone who joins a channel. You’ll only see greeting messages for users with…

So you’ve registered your nick, but have more than one computer/device that you join IRC from. You might be wondering “do I need to register a new nick and have people add that nick to access lists as well? Certainly there must be an easier way.” Well luckily for you, there is. You are able…

Every now and then, a question that arises in #help is if people can see the IP address of another individual. Since GeekShed encrypt users’ IP addresses and hostmasks the short answer is no, other people can not see your IP address. The long answer is the following: The only people that can see a…